A Good Weekend

My living room looks 150% better than it did on Friday morning.

My entryway has been cleaned out, with more old stuff having been donated to a thrift store.

My daughter did a great job with her math homework -- and with helping with the carpet project.

My Ex and I are talking about moving, and I'm starting to let myself dream big again about what I really want.

I am not going to be involved with my teacher's shamanic healing center, but the process of coming to that answer has helped me focus on my own primary vocational goal again: that of being a spiritual director/companion, and I'm investigating a reputable certificate program that will be more focused, take less time, and cost less than my current MA program.

And, I spent a couple of serious chunks of time working on those characters for my novel, and yesterday found the key to Reg Stanley. He actually turns up a couple of times earlier in the story -- or rather, he turned up once in the original version, and needs to be written into a couple of sequences where he would have been in the first place, had I known he existed -- so I've been returning to those episodes and writing them from his point of view, so I can engage the story from his perspective, instead of trying to push him into it as my plot puppet.

They hate it when I make them plot puppets.

One of Those Mom Moments

I'm reading Stephen Covey's The Eighth Habit: From Effectiveness to Greatness, and in it he talks about how the best way to learn a subject is to teach it. He then goes on to encourage parents to invite their children to teach them what they're learning in school.

"Great idea!" I thought. "My daughter loves to help people by giving them good advice. She'll be delighted to teach me what she's learned."

So after story time this evening I said to her, "What did you do in school today? Can you teach me something you learned?"

She looked at me like I was nuts, then said emphatically, "Don't feed broccoli to guinea pigs. It gives them stinky gas!"

And yes, this educational moment was result of direct observation today, when she and a friend fed the class pets conspicuous amounts of broccoli.

A zoologist in the making, that's her. . .

Battlestar Galactica Theology

I've only watched the miniseries and the first two eps of season one ("33" and "Water") but one topic is becoming increasingly prominent to me.

I might not have even noticed fully if athenian_abroad hadn't raised the subject of the Cylons' monotheism: but it's fascinating to me how the representative of the mechanical race speaks so frequently of "God," and what a clear distinction she makes between those who created her race and the being she calls "God."

Unless I'm mis-remembering my classwork, it's almost gnostic: the separation of the Divine One from the fallen 'demiurge' who is the creator of the material world.

And unfortunately, that's all the mental horsepower I can muster on this topic tonight.